5 Steps to Getting Clients

Long time no speak. I’ve been busy away helping women create kick ass re-brand’s, but I’ve also been building my team in the background which is super exciting! More on that soon.

I wanted to chat to you about 2 client calls I had this week (one brought me to tears, and the other solidified the problem women in business face – wanting to re-brand but they don’t know how).

Check out my video and find out what happened…

So when building a brand, yes design helps, a lot. It’s much easier to feel confident about buying from someone when they look legit, credible and have professional, functional design. It automatically builds trust.

But it’s also about building a connection with our target audience.

Let me tell you a few tips to help you create that sweet spot in your business (that is, to look credible and connect with your ideal clients):

1. Specialise in an area (you can call it a niche) and find clients who you can help in this niche (your target market) by connecting with their pain.

Now that’s a lot in one sentence so you may want to read that again. Specialise in an area or niche, and find clients who you can help in that niche by pin pointing their pain.

In business, especially in this oversaturated marketplace, it’s never a good idea to specialise in no particular (generalised) market. It’s also never a great idea to try and target anyone and everyone. Your message will be really broad, diluted, and just bland (I’d prefer to say BLEH) and you’ll end up connecting with nobody. As the saying goes “Chase 2 rabbits, catch none”.

By targeting a broad group instead of a niche, you’ll have a much harder time hitting home or connecting with anyone. Imagine being in a busy crowded place and yelling out “hey everyone!”. Chances are, most people will keep going about their day and ignore you the crazy person yelling out to everyone. But if you yell out “Hey Bill!”, there’s a much higher chance of someone stopping and paying attention.

So double down and specialise in 1 area. Then create your client avatar that has that problem you can help them solve in that market. And what I really mean by this is: Pin point the pain that your client currently faces in business. What is it? Right it down.

Example:

So for me, my clients have been in business 2+ years, and their current branding doesn’t align to them anymore. They have grown in business, things are moving along, but now they want to up-level and attract higher paying clients. They want to go to that next level in business. They want their brand to look more high end. They want to feel confident behind their brand so they can feel confident showing up in business. But, they either don’t know how to do this or where to start, or they’ve hired designers in the past who haven’t done a very good job in turning their new business vision into the brand they hoped or envisioned. So it’s really disheartening and hard to trust a designer to come through for them. That’s my type of client. I know them and their pains. And I love helping these ladies re-brand and exceed all their expectations and visions for their business with a beautiful, functional, high end brand that aligns to them and also appeals to their ideal clients, to create the business of their dreams.

Notice how I recognised the pain they face in business (their brand doesn’t align to them anymore. They don’t feel confident showing up behind their brand.) And I recognised how I can help them solve that problem (re-brand to be perceived as a high-end, luxury brand. Up-level and ultimately feel confident about charging more).

2. You want to integrate your brand story through your brand, so that you create human connection and resonate with your ideal audience.

I am seeing a common thread in successful entrepreneurs more and more these days. They are genuine. They show up in a real, human way. This is what creates connection. This is memorable. People gravitate toward that. So be yourself in business. Unsure what your unique point of difference is? YOU are your unique point of difference. Don’t take that for granted. No one is like you. Use it to your advantage.

Gone are the days where businesses are corporate and fancy shamncy, people dress in suits to a business meeting and speak using jargon and complicated terms. I mean this still happens in some business, but have you noticed that business is evolving, and we are connecting with brands that have more human interaction? Look at uber and their fun billboard ads. Look at Jobs from Apple and the friendly staff he has on ground at Apple stores. Even those bloody instagram models, some of them are coming out wearing no makeup and talking about their problems. We love it! Because we can connect and resonate with it. It removes the facade that is the front people put on social media causing a lot of people to believe that perfect is real. Ain’t no body got time for that!

What is the last business that left an impression on you? Was it not because a human gave great customer experience, or a story was told that resonated with you?

3. Design a kick ass brand identity.

I may be bias, but there’s a reason the big guys use branding and strict style guides when creating anything for their business. Design works. Consistent design helps you get recognised quickly and more easily.

Not only is good, clean design more functional, it just gives people a good feeling overall. It’s professional. It shows you care about the perception you hold in the marketplace. A good brand is the sum of customer experience, but it’s also composed of visual and tonal brand components, many of which are shaped by interactive design.

It’s all good and well to have a great logo design and website, but that’s often not the answer. There’s a step you must take before getting into the design of your brand (and a lot of designer’s miss this step completely).

It’s important to encase beautiful, functional design with strategy. And this is where we come in. Before we even speak about colours, fonts and logo design, we take you through a brand strategy session where we deep dive into your business, who you are and what makes you special. We find out your story and we package that up into a unique way that embodies your story in a way that connects with your ideal client. Remember that human connection part in point 2? We are craving more of that in today’s day and age.

Our brand packages include more than a logo, fonts and colours. It includes brand strategy, where we get to know your business and your unique story and help you curate your business vision statement, your tagline, and we strategically position you in the market place to stand out.

Here at Sarah Rose Design, we help you with:

4. Then of course we have to market your business.

There’s no point creating a gorgeous logo or website and having it sit there, right? We need some eye balls on it! But without the strategy in place, you might be stuck after launching your brand thinking, “where are all my customers?”. This is where the marketing strategy comes in to play. We want to get your business out there in a way that speaks, connects and resonates with your target market.

To really connect with your clients, we want to find your client’s problem, and we want to solve it. It’s that simple. In order to land clients, we want to communicate the issue your client is facing in a way makes them think “omg how did she know? It’s like she’s in my head!”. The first step we want to do is pin point the client’s problem.

So many of my client’s find it hard to articulate the actual problem it is their clients have. We are all focusing on what product or service we offer, but we fail to think of what problem we are solving from the client’s perspective. It’s so, so important to sit down and dig deep into your ideal client and what it is that keeps them up at night, what it is they struggle with but don’t know how to fix.

After we recognise the clients problem, we want to pave the way to solving that issue for your client. That’s really what business is all about. Solving problems for people, right?

But in order to be the person who people want to work with to solve their problem, we need to connect with our client in a deeper way.

In order to be the go to person for our product or service, we need to know their problem better than they know their own problem. And we want to communicate that through our web copy, social media posts, emails etc. After we communicate openly our client’s pains, then we want to provide them the solution to that problem.

If we can do this, that means instead of offering a transactional service to people and competing with others on price, we offer them a valuable service that they will want and need. Because we understand their pain, they want to then hire us to help them solve their problem. We connected with them and got in their head. We read their mind. Now they want our help because they feel we “get them”, that we understand them.

This is what it is to connect with your customer.

It is not enough to just voice the service we do and how we do it. We need to connect with and recognise the pain our client’s face to get their attention. THEN we talk about our offer/product/service. This will position you as the expert and the go to person in your niche.

Does this make sense? Let me know.

Back in 2009-2012:

I was the girl who started a business only for it to fail miserably. (I started two businesses actually. Both failed). I tried to do everything myself and I tried to do it all on my own with no help.

Now that I look back I think, who did I think I was? I didn’t have any business experience, so how did I expect it all to work?

I didn’t connect with my customers or recognise their pains. I selfishly went into business and put out there what I thought was a solution. Me. I failed to recognise from my client’s view what their pain was. So you can bet I had a really hard time finding clients.

I’ve been through that and learnt those necessary lessons, and now I can help women in business create brands that further them along in business, without them feeling stuck thinking “where the clients at?”.

And, I’ve built a team of AMAZING people who specialise in their own fields, in order to help get my clients not only create a beautiful brand they’re confident to show up with, but also launch their brands in a powerful, effective way that speaks to their ideal clients.

Meet the team:

I’ll give you a short run down on each member soon – so keep an eye out for that so that YOU can learn how to elevate your business branding, strategy and marketing, all in the one place. YAY! (Can you tell I’m excited 😜).

What are you struggling with in business right now? Email me at info@sarahrosedesign.com.au and let me know. I’d love to write some blogs that can help others who may be going through the same problem. So hit me up. I’d love to help.